Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Rhetorical eruptions

A guest post by Steve Whitehouse, a
founding friend – a funding friend, in fact – of Quote Unquote the magazine, and occasional
satirist.

Rhetorical
eruptions set to continue, say geologists

Emergency supplies of opinions are being
rushed to New Zealand’s main centres following the violent eruption of Mount
McLauchlan in the Hauraki Gulf.

An eyewitness on the RNZN survey ship Hooton reports that “giant flashes of
viewpoints are illuminating the night sky on matters ranging from quantum
physics to early childhood education and the Arab Spring. We’ve also detected
traces of Ryanite in the atmosphere, a sure sign that the event is far from
over.”

GNS geologist Gordon McCabe said, “Normally
the mountain emits about 10 opinions a month, but in the last 24 hours alone it
has issued more than 100 points of view. Some of the recent outbursts have
registered as high as 5.2 on the Hickey scale. We’ve seen nothing like this
since the Muldoonocene extinction nearly 40 years ago”.

The phenomenon appears to have been
triggered by a lahar from Lake Boag which caused clouds of sulphuric steam to
rise from fissures along the Edwards fault. This in turn seems to have set off
Mount McLauchlan. The resulting swarms of outrage have been detected as far
away as the Odger Observatory in Hong Kong.

Plumes of belief have risen into the
Mora-sphere and are being carried South, blotting out alternative points of
view.

In the Wairarapa, the Perigo River has
burst its banks. Residents of the hamlet of Coddington have retreated to higher
ground and taken shelter in the picturesque Church of St Ayn where they are
refusing any government assistance.

In Wellington, frustrated bloggers and
commentators have been aimlessly roaming the streets in a desperate attempt to
express themselves. A Kedgley-Farrar two-stage rocket has been fired into the
upper atmosphere but with no discernible effect.

Meanwhile, the relief comments being issued
by the government to fill the vacuum have come under criticism. “They’re just
tired, out-of-date, failed ideas from the neo-liberal 1980s which have been
stored in a warehouse in Remuera,” said Josie Trotter of the Aro Street
Innumeracy Foundation. “What we need is new, evidence-based policies from the
1930s.”

The only part of the country not to have
been closed down by the pall of smug is Dunedin where the Auckland eruption has
activated an experimental opinion machine designed by Otago University.

“The Flynn-a-tron, which we have installed
on the slopes of Dougal Heights, has turned itself on and we don’t know how to
turn it off,” said a university spokesman. “It is apparently working its way
through the alphabet. It has so far emitted definitive interpretations of
subjects starting with Aristotle and, as of yesterday, it had reached Libyan
politics and even the Tennessee Valley Authority.”

Attempts to inject irony into the system by
Sir Winston Jones have so far failed.